


End Bloody

by Nottherealdean



Series: Dean!clones [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alcohol, Blood, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Torture, dean!clones, puppet!deans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 21:21:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1702940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nottherealdean/pseuds/Nottherealdean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean shows up on Victor's doorstep, and Victor remembers what happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	End Bloody

**Author's Note:**

> Posted on tumblr on Mar. 17, 2014.

Victor flipped back through the file on the most recent victim. He’d read it, at least ten times already, but the killer’s cycle was coming due for another murder soon. Slipping some of the witness statements into his briefcase before the weekend seemed like the least he could do for the next poor bastard. Otherwise the next dead gas-station attendant would weigh extra heavy on his shoulders, and he’d just be digging through the evidence again, this time hoping he could keep number seven from  _becoming_  number seven.

He started in on statement from the attendant on the previous shift. A minivan full of kids who needed the bathroom. Two truckers. A woman who bought cheetos. A man who bought a six pack. A couple who bought… something, but mostly grossed the attendant out with PDA. A man who bought two packages of sunflower seeds and a slim jim. Victor paused. Did that ring a bell? Had one of the previous crime scenes included a receipt for that in the till? He thought maybe it had, the fourth victim. He tried to hold back his excitement: even if it was the same purchase that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It didn’t mean that it was the killer, checking out his target and scoping the surveillance cameras. 

Victor called it in. He waited while the junior agent he bossed away from his own work checked the files for the receipts. He made him read out every single one until he hit it, the two bags of sunflower seeds and slim jim, charged (dear baby Jesus on a goddamn ray of sunshine) to a credit card. 

He felt euphoria begin to creep through him, and once again tried to reel himself in. They didn’t have the killer yet. A lot could go wrong. But he could feel it now, they were going to get this guy. They were going to  _get him_.

He was stacking the witness statements up, readying himself to leave for the office and start pinning this guy down, when the door bell rang. 

Male, thirties, 6’1” or so, white with short brown hair, brown tee shirt, open gray coat over it, olive drab coat over  _that_. Scrunching up his lips and gazing around while he waited for the door to open. Victor’s elation tricked away, replaced by a gnawing dread. Something was very, very wrong.

He stepped back from the peephole and opened the door. 

“Victor, hey— Uh, Agent Hendriksen,” Dean Winchester said, starting out with a smile and then seeming to catch himself. 

“I just make the break that let us catch the Pump’n’Go Killer,” Victor said, not moving out of the doorway.

“Well, congrats on that,” said Dean. “Really. But—”

“Funny thing is, we caught that guy three years before I ever heard of you.”

Dean looked guilty. “Yeah. About that. You want to hear this here, or can I come inside?”

Victor opened the door wider and stepped back. Dean came through the threshold, then paused awkwardly on the entry mat.

“You want me to…” He gestured vaguely at his boots, then at the pale carpet.

“No, I just want you to tell me what the hell is going on. Because this is not regular life and it’s not exactly how my dreams usually go either.”

“Not enough swimsuits?” Dean tried, but Victor could see he was rattled. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t looking forward to telling Victor. “Look, what do you remember? About me, about what happened.”

Victor tried to organize it in his head. “Credit card fraud. Grave desecration, theft, murder charges, the bank job, attempted robbery, that tip-off on your location, and oh, the fact that your delusional, bullshit justifications for the massive amounts of crime you’ve perpetrated actually pan out.”

There was something else, but it was lurking hazily in the back of his mind and he wasn’t going to wait for it before getting an explanation.

“Okay, well at least you remember that part. That should make this easier.” Dean looked even more uneasy however, and Victor could tell he was working up to something. “I’m not going to lie, this is probably going to be _really_  unpleasant, so if you’d rather just go back to— to catching your killer, I’ll leave and I swear I won’t come back. You can just let this go.”

Victor felt the thing hiding in his memories stir. Whatever it was, it was big, and bloody, and awful.

“I think you’d better go pour us some of the wine in the kitchen. It’s the box next to the fridge,” he said, turning back toward the living room.

He settled back into the sofa while Dean went for the wine. He pushed the stack of papers further onto the coffee table. The Pump’n’Go killer suddenly seemed… small. Memories weren’t surfacing so much as circling under the water like sharks, a flash of fin and tail slicing through—

Dean returned with the wine. He’d found the wine glasses, and filled them either social-reject-drifter-raised-by-obsessive-paranoid-military-father or your-gonna-need-the-anasthetic full. He had to place them on the table gently to keep them from slopping over.

“Tell me,” Victor said, steeling himself.

Dean sat on the edge of the sofa with a stiffness Victor knew wasn’t just lack of social graces.

“When we were in the police station, and there were all those demons,” Dean started. “And we exorcized ‘em. Well, one got through. Told the boss, Lilith. And after we left— me and Sam— she came back. Lilith. Probably wearing a little girl.”

The sharks in Victor’s head were beginning to thrash.

“She killed everyone. Not quickly. You—” Dean took a breath. “Your spirit got raised up later as part of breaking these seals to let Lucifer out— there was this plan to start the apocalypse— and you said that she started with Nancy. Made you wait until last.”

There was blood, everywhere, inside him.

“You’re dead. I’m sorry. I should have stuck around, I should have guessed that it wasn’t safe and I should have been there.”

Dean’s voice was starting to fade out, overpowered by the memories of screams. He’d wanted, desperately, for them to stop at first, for rescue to come or the little girl to have mercy, get bored, let them go. And then the screaming had gone on longer and he’d lost hope of Nancy ever being okay again, and he started to want the screams to  _stop_ , horrible as that was. He’d thought that wish stained him at the time; wanting Nancy to die, even if it would be a mercy. But then Lilith moved on to the deputy, and the little part of himself that he sometimes hated— the part that the rational side of his mind knew was just healthy, normal self-preservation and survival instinct, the part that fought to keep him alive and would tell him to put his own oxygen mask on first in a failing airplane— that voice in his head told him that at some point, when the screaming stopped, he’d be next. And that watching could never be a fraction as bad as experiencing it. It’d been right.

The stem of a wineglass was pushed into his hand, and his fingers were held curled around it as it was raised up toward his face. Another hand was pressed against his shoulder, arm wrapped around his back like it might need to hold him up.  _Hey, hey Victor, come on, stay with me, stay here, have little bit of your box wine and wash it down, are you here, are you with me?_

The taste of the cheap red wine rinsed some of the flavor of blood out of his mouth. He felt disconnected and shaky, but he could see the coffee table in front of him again, and the cream walls of his apartment beyond it.

He struggled to focus on something, anything.

“I don’t remember telling you that. I don’t remember being a spirit,” his own voice sounded distant in his ears.

“Yeah well, you were being controlled then. It wasn’t  _really_  you.” Dean’s arm was still tight against him. “I’m sorry, man. You didn’t deserve it.”

“Lucifer. Starting the apocalypse.” Victor took a gulp of wine on his own, Dean’s grip loosening around his own but not fully trusting him with the glass.

“I know, things really went to shit for a while. World nearly burned down without you there, huh? But it— it mostly worked out. The devil got locked back up again and all the crap that happened after, it didn’t— Humanity’s still kicking and the world’s not a cinder. Got puppies and flowers and little kids finger painting and shit still, so there’s that.”

“Where is this? Where are we?” Victor asked, starting to find a tentative equilibrium. He sipped at his wine, and Dean let go of his hand to take his own glass and pour half of it into Victor’s. He’d drunk almost all of it without noticing.

“Heaven. Well, your personal heaven. It’s like being in a holodeck with all your favorite memories on autoplay. That’s kinda why I came here.”

Victor felt Dean shift slightly, probably turning to look at him. He was beginning to feel more present, like he was touching the sofa instead of floating an inch above the leather.

“We found a way to open up all the little heavens. There’s this guy who’s real good at math and programming and all, and that’s kinda what Heaven-with-a-big-h runs on. So we found him and he figured out this thing. To make it so people can leave their personal heaven, or let other people in. Only the person who’s heaven it is can open their door, so don’t worry about Great-Aunt Edna and her shih tzu camping out in your living room or Mother Teresa raiding your fridge. And uh, it makes it so you can change the tape, if you get tired of your ‘best of’ album and want something new.”

“So I’ve just been living—,” Victor glanced around the room, “— _this_? Over and over?”

“Pretty much.” Dean reached out and nudged the witness statements on the table. “Can’t fault your commitment to the job. That’s dedication, right there.” He gave Victor a quick smile, and Victor realized he was trying to keep him distracted. This guy, wanted for multiple felonies, who thought nothing of digging up little old ladies and torching them in their graves, was trying to be comforting.  _Shit_. 

“But, well, I figured you might want to know what’s really going on. Since you were pissed when you found out monsters are real and you’d been slogging along after these boring bastards you don’t even get to shoot.” He tapped the statements two fingers. “I don’t really know what the situation here is exactly, but I do know Heaven’s not all it cracked up to be and it doesn’t seem fair good people should have to settle for some cut-rate, cubicle-farm afterlife where all you get to do is hang out with holograms instead of real people. So if you want, there’s stuff to do. Things that could make a difference to a lotta people.” He straightened the edges of the statements. “But nobody’d hold it against you if you take your retirement package and chill. Kill some time and then go see if those ex-wives you mentioned are still angry, or just stay here and let the tape keep playing ‘til you forget it’s a tape. You’ve given a hell of a lot, man. More than you should’ve had to. You can be done.”

Victor couldn’t process the choice yet, it was too much too soon and his mind just stumbled into a blank. The periphery of it though, that he could handle and it gave him something to latch onto instead of the memories still trying to drown him.

“So you’re dead too? But you knew this was Heaven?” Victor let his FBI training and instincts buoy up his efforts: when in doubt, gather more information and assess the situation.

Dean hesitated. “It’s weird. Like, weird-even-for-me weird.”

“Go fill this up, then.” Victor passed him his glass.

Dean pulled open the side of his coat to flash a silver flask. “I’ve got something stronger if…?”

“No,” Victor said, “I like wine.”

Dean nodded. “‘Kay. I’ll just— I’ll go get that.” His arm slid off Victor’s back as he stood. Victor had forgotten it was still there.  _Oh_ , he thought,  _he doesn’t want to leave me by myself_.

Dean came back with the glass still empty and the box tucked under his arm. He put it on the table and angled the spigot over the edge so he could pour it while sitting.

“Am I a suicide risk  _after_  I’m already dead?” Victor asked. “You brought that in here so you wouldn’t have to go back to the kitchen if I asked for more,” he clarified when Dean frowned at him.

“Maybe I’m just lazy,” Dean said with another flash of a grin. “No, I just thought—” He shrugged and gave a quick breath of a laugh. “It can be rough being alone after something like that.” He leaned back into sofa and rubbed his palms down his pants before beginning his explanation.

“So. This friend of mine, he’s an angel— but don’t get excited ‘cause most of them are assholes you don’t want to run into. But my friend, he started acting  _off_. And we were trying to save this other angel and it got… I don’t know. But he left and the next thing I know I’m in this warehouse. This dark warehouse. And Cas, my friend, he shows up and he—” Dean gave a half-shrug. “He stabs me. And I feel myself bleeding out, you know, dying, and then I’m waking up on the floor. The same warehouse, but with all the lights turned on, and the weird part is, is that there are all these  _other_  mes. Hundreds of ‘em. And we don’t know if one of us is the original Dean and the rest are copies, or if the real Dean is down on Earth partying and we’re all some kind of fakes. So, maybe I’m dead and maybe not. Maybe I wasn’t even alive to begin with.”

“You’re getting pretty existential for a guy who didn’t finish high school,” said Victor, trying to draw out more almost on autopilot. Here was Dean Winchester, talking about himself. After hundreds of hours of trying to get into this guy’s head to nail him down and get him to stay nailed, the chance of making him talk was a welcome relief from other thoughts.

“Yeah, and what’s a diploma going to do for me when there are demons? Besides, GED’s supposed to include “equivalent” isn’t it?”

“Actually it’s General  _Education Development_ , not General Equivalency Diploma, so no, it doesn’t.” Victor noted the defensiveness. Not as clear a response as he’d gotten from the digs he’d made about John Winchester back at the bank, and then at the station before—  _No_.

Victor swallowed down a mouthful of wine and poked harder. “So, little brother goes to Stanford, but you, what? Settle for the dropout degree?”

Dean’s expression tightened, and he took a deep breath. Held it and let it out slowly through his nose.

“That’s about right,” he said. “Keeping people from dying’s important. And someone had to make sure Dad didn’t let himself get killed,” he added, his voice deliberate enough for Victor to realize he’d seen the barb for what it was, but had decided to give Victor what he wanted anyway.

“It was hard on him, having something come outta nowhere and kill Mom right in front of him and there not being a damn thing he could do to stop it. He needed to be bumped back onto the rails from time to time, have someone else out there waiting for him to come back, or else he’d start getting reckless. And before Sam left, I couldn’t exactly bail on him either. Leaving him and Dad alone together? They’d be at each other’s throats before the day was out.”

Dean paused, and gave Victor a sideways glance while he took a drink from his glass for the first time. “How’s that fit your profile, Clarice?”

"Oh, I’m not making any comparisons yet. You’re going to sit here and give me a full fucking autobiography first." Subtle was blown, so Victor figured he might as well go for direct. Throw it out like a dare and maybe he’d rise to the challenge. 

Dean looked at him, jaw tight, and said, “You being an asshole because it keeps the bad thoughts away, or just for funsies?”

"I told her I was going to get her through it," Victor answered without thinking, the words rising up like bubbles from the deep: tiny but growing so fast as they rose to the surface. "I told her I’d keep her safe."

Dean was quiet for just long enough that Victor started to feel like he was going to sink under again, the memories swirling around him and pulling him down. Then Dean reached out with his glass and clinked it against Victor’s.

"And I was supposed to keep you all safe," he said. "If there’s someone to blame, it’s me. None of you should have even had to deal with demons. You shoulda all been able to—" He stopped abruptly to take a gulp of wine. 

"Mom died when I was four," he said, voice softer. "Do you know about that? The fire?"

Victor nodded, not sure what was happening.

"It wasn’t an ordinary fire. It was a demon." Pain, and anger, and loss were spread out on Dean’s face. He wasn’t trying to mask anything now, and Victor realized he was giving it up— giving himself up— as some sort of consolation or apology. Atonement through laying himself bare so Victor could have a distraction. 

No. Victor would take any life raft on offer to keep himself afloat, but he wasn’t going to drag someone else down to keep his head above the water. Not here, not where there were other options. 

"Stop."

Dean looked startled, caught off guard and for once not trying to hide it. 

"We’ll talk about something else. Whackjobs we’ve chased, exes we want to complain about." There would be something else he could stave off the memories with, or a different way of getting into Dean’s head that didn’t involve this kind of self-surrender. 

"Well, uh—," Dean stumbled, clearly still off kilter, "I don’t really have any of _those_.” He gave an awkward laugh. “I— I gotta say, I count myself lucky for getting to have the part before the ‘ex-” happens. I mean, I’m not exactly date material here.” He fidgeted with his glass.

"That’s why you have to date within your career pool," Victor replied, drawing it along and acting like it was a normal, everyday conversation. He noted that Dean hadn’t said he didn’t want to be in a relationship. There were no protestations of preferring one-night stands or macho, survivalist blustering about being the one to walk away. "That way you’re with an equally bad catch and everybody knows what to expect."

"Says the guy with ex-wives, plural," said Dean with fake lightness, and Victor could tell he was making an effort to keep up with the whiplash change, to help Victor carry them somewhere less murky and dangerous. He could work with this. He could keep the sharks at bay with it. 

"I had a learning curve. And all I said was then they know what they’re getting into, not that it works out." 

"Yeah, that’s uplifting, Dr. Phil," Dean said, still trying gamely at a bantering tone. 

"I have a couple of angry ex-boyfriends, too," Victor added, watching Dean’s reaction, "if you want to keep track." 

He looked surprised, but it was followed by a flash of something else, maybe a hint of pleasure? Happiness?

"Huh," Dean said, and Victor was sure there was something positive in his tone, "Fancy that. Guess we should have been doing that cat-and-mouse flirting thing." The cheerfulness was less stiff, more genuine. He gave Victor a grin, somehow successfully managing to hit that goofy, boy-next-door cute that no one who had ever mutilated a corpse should be able to get within miles of. "If I’d known, I could’ve put you on my visitors list at Green River. I bet the dirty talk across the glass would’ve been awesome."

Well then. That was… unexpected.

"I don’t have phone sex with satanic killers in the visiting room of a detention center," Victor said.

"Yeah but," Dean said, "I actually tried to kill Satan, so I’m about as far from a satanist as you can get. And the killer thing… yeah, okay, but not like  _that_. We could’ve had some fun.” 

Victor watched him twirl his wineglass stem with a slight smile still on his face. He was talking about it in the past tense, not acting like he had a chance at it now. As if he was content with it just being something that could have happened, once: a possibility to look back on but not chase after. Maybe that’s how to live with chasing honest-to-god monsters and not be eaten away by it, Victor thought, letting other things slip away to focus in on the thing that will destroy you. 

Victor wasn’t good at letting things go. The stubbornness he put into his job also went into his personal life, and maybe that was the real reason behind his string of broken relationships. He would go after faint opportunities, doggedly clinging to the hope that this one would work out when all the signs pointed to a dead end or a false lead. He’d try to make a relationship work like that was another part of his job, dragging it out when it started to go cold (or had never really been hot to start with) instead of ending it and moving on. 

He looked at Dean, and despite everything— despite all past history warning him against it, despite the fact that Dean Winchester was about two tons of trouble and aggravation stuffed into one human body, despite the horror that was lurking inside his head waiting to swallow him down— he could feel himself start to open the metaphorical case file. He was too tipsy, too reeling from shock, to pick up the trail right now, but later, later he might be able to see a way. 


End file.
